Data at the Chadron Police Department was temporarily unavailable for a time recently, after the department was hit with a ransomware attack.
Hackers accessed an old server with a vulnerable port connected to a copy machine about a month ago, said Police Chief Tim Lordino.
“There was no data taken. All of our data was essentially corrupted or encrypted,” he said.
The hackers demanded $20,000 in ransom to turn over a key to un-encrypt the data.
“We chose not to pay it,” Lordino said.
While the department’s computers were down for two or three days, the office had a good enough back-up system in place to refuse to pay the ransom, instead using its backups to get systems up and running again.
“We had to rebuild our server. We had pretty healthy backups. It just takes a bit of time to load that data back on to the server.”
The department’s IT officials have made changes to the departments servers to increase security, and the CPD has instituted an even more robust backup program.